Archive Post: baseball purgatory December 4, 2007

In honor of the Rangers’ projected general non-action at the Winter Meetings, here’s a re-post of a rant from early this summer, back when I still had the energy to care about that abomination of a team.

baseball purgatory
I have a new guilty pleasure & that is listening to people talk about how horrible the Rangers are. It’s moved past depressing & into hilariously awful. Seriously. Think about it. They are SOOOOOOOOOO BAD. Better yet, they have NOOOOOOOOO FUTURE! How many teams can say that? GO RANGERS!

I don’t know WTF they are doing. And hehe, OMG, I don’t think they know either! Bwahahaha! See? Hilarious! They’re the worst team in baseball. They’re still playing Sammy Sosa, Brad Wilkerson, Eric Gagne & Kenny Lofton, but I can even sort of see how you need to be showcasing & seeing if you can get their value to a point where we can get some nice double-A guys for them. What is a lot more confusing is how they are running out guys like Ramon Vazquez & Marlon Byrd, birth years 1976 & 77 respectively. I demand an explanation. What is the point here? I don’t care if they are leading the team in batting average! They’re over 30 & nobody else wanted them! I don’t want to see them! I! DON’T! CARE!

You know, I usually have a rule not to root against my team, but I feel this is grounds for an exception. I am to the point where I am actively rooting for record-breaking futility. B/c the worst thing that can happen is they get their act together & pull out another one of those 4-6-games-below-.500/third-place seasons & Hicks gets it in his head they’re only a few gritty veterans away from getting that pesky division win/rapid first-round exit. I want them to just bottom out so they have no choice but to do something—ANYTHING!—other than what they’ve been doing.

Maybe you don’t understand who you are. Let me tell you. You’re the Rangers. You’re the worst team in all of Major League Baseball. You’ve got a couple of guys who you’re about to auction off to the highest bidder, who you will be lucky to turn into several future 4th outfielders. You’ve got a star first-baseman dying to flee to Baltimore whose agent, the AntiChrist, your owner has personally funded multiple yachts for. You’re still “not certain” you don’t want to shove a record-breaking contract down his throat to force him to stay on the sinking ship. You’ve got a GM who has somehow managed to turn every deal he’s touched, no matter how good it might have initially looked, into a rotting pile of regret. You’ve got a rookie manager who the players have now turned on & who is regularly making inexplicable in-game decisions seemingly designed to upheave any small remaining possibility for winning your shocking lack of talent, character & leadership has left intact. You’ve got an owner who, after several years of insisting on a payroll more suited for the small market of Dallas/Ft Worth, has bought an English soccer team & who is regularly making bizarre, seemingly random, unprovoked, insulting statements about his teams’ fanbases, both of whom have spent years begging him to sell their teams. You’ve got a local media base who is running a futility marker on your march toward the worst year in the history of what has admittedly been a truly disasterous franchise, when they bother to cover you at all. You’ve got a municipality whose other teams have packed it in for the summer & headed to the golf course & whose fans with disposible incomes & working television sets you still cannot attract & who look upon your impressive incompetence with a suprising lack of anger, due to an unshakable overall blanket of raging apathy.

You are a franchise without even the slightest glimmer of hope.

This is not the time to be taking flyers on journeymen over 30. Those of us who have not already committed to full-time waiting for Cowboys training camp want to see kids & we want to see them NOW. ALL KIDS, ALL THE TIME. I am serious. I basically don’t want to see Jason Botts not wearing a Rangers uniform from now until such time as this season is mercifully over. He better be wearing that thing to bed. Any player you have in the minors who you have a question about, you get to have that question answered right now. Every trade from this point forward needs to involve a decent prospect coming back our way. It is time to take a good hard look at yourself & realize you are NOT just a few gritty veterans away. You can’t GET further away than you are right now. It’s time to blow this puppy up & start rebuilding.

And LOOK! I like Mark Teixiera too. But it’s time to get real, folks. Do you really want to sink the amount of money it’s going to take to get him to stay in this hellhole? More importantly, is your owner, upon spending that money, going to immediately go into A-Rod-disease-induced can’t-spend mode?

I say, start laying your groundwork now, wait until the night when he has 2 grand slams to propel the Rangers to a 12-8 loss, & ship him outta here for the best package of prospects the Yankees can scrape together.

If we’re lucky, we can have this thing back to 3rd place in 2 or 3 seasons.